> How does NYT enabling ad exchanges enable advertisers to target NYT readers or the NYT website?
tl;dr: My understanding is that an advertiser can use ads on the NYT to profile its audience, then use that profile to target the same audience on cheaper sites.
I can't find the link now, but I've read that this practice is killing the economics that drive the production of quality content. Quality content is expensive but it attracts a higher-value audience, and sites make it with the expectation they can pay for it by charging more for ads shown to that audience. However, that audience also consumes low-quality content, and smart advertisers realized they can get more bang for their buck by running "research ads" to profile the high-quality site's audience, but then target that same audience on low-quality sites.
So ad targeting discourages the production of quality content, and encourages clickbait and memes in its place.
I thought part of the problem with the ad exchanges was that they're very hard to police, so what they officially don't allow has limited bearing on what actually happens.
Typically an ad will go through multiple vendors (dsp, exchange, ssp, ssp, etc) and then to the publisher. One of these will catch it, and if not a publisher as big as NYT has tools in place to catch it.
But yes things can slip through, but its mostly unapproved creative (gambling, etc) rather than code which is easy to catch.
tl;dr: My understanding is that an advertiser can use ads on the NYT to profile its audience, then use that profile to target the same audience on cheaper sites.
I can't find the link now, but I've read that this practice is killing the economics that drive the production of quality content. Quality content is expensive but it attracts a higher-value audience, and sites make it with the expectation they can pay for it by charging more for ads shown to that audience. However, that audience also consumes low-quality content, and smart advertisers realized they can get more bang for their buck by running "research ads" to profile the high-quality site's audience, but then target that same audience on low-quality sites.
So ad targeting discourages the production of quality content, and encourages clickbait and memes in its place.